Apple Inc.: Customer Loyal Customers

This paper focuses on Apple Inc.’s cult-like following, Apple stores as a marketing strategy, and the company’s ability to maintain its current level of success in product innovation and customer loyalty moving forward. It is a well-known fact that Apple has developed a following of loyal customers that has often been referred to as cult-like and Apple customers have been referred to as iSheep (a term coined to describe the herds of blind followers). According to research conducted by simonlycontracts.co.uk, only 28% of the 2,275 Apple customers surveyed purchased their iPhone because it “seemed to be the best phone at the time of switching” (Kelly, 2014, para. 11). This leads one to question how if only 28% perceived the iPhone to be the

Owning one product can be easily used with another. When customers are eligible for an upgrade new equipment, they can easily change over all of their information without hassle. Staying loyal, in a sense, is easier to do than to start over with a completely new product. Customers also enjoy the fact that if they purchase a product they know it will outlast other competitive products in the market as well as the fact that Apple has introduced bigger products to compete with Android now with the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. These customers are sometimes claimed to only be purchasing the products just because it is an Apple product and not from researching other products in the market. This could hurt the company later on if these customers start looking into their product choices more

Customers can come in and test out the different products to find what they would actually like instead of what they think they would like. The marketing impact, in turn, has a positive influence for customers to see more products than just the ones they intended on purchasing and at that moment will purchase more than they were planning. The company changed the retail world with their store setup by allowing all the products that customers can see to be fully functional and connected to test, whereas competitors tend to display non-working “dummy” models of their products. Allowing customers to be interactive with the merchandise was the single greatest marketing concept for a technology